Space X CEO, Tesla CEO, and Paypal founder Elon Musk made an appearance on The Daily Show last…
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Now PETA, yes, the animal people, are imploring the Tesla and SpaceX founder to make sure that Mars is a "Vegan" planet. When we colonize it they want it to be totally animal byproduct free. Wait, what?

Musk's goal is to land a space shuttle on Mars by 2018. just five years from now. PETA is jumping all over this as a way to create it's own vision of a utopian society: One that doesn't eat meat.

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The opportunity to colonize Mars means a chance to make a fresh start, especially now that we've degraded our own planet by treating our fellow animals like disposable widgets, filled the air with pollution that will soon make the sky in "Soylent Green" look clear, and populated the Earth with so many humans that the premise of "Logan's Run" starts to look practical. We can get off on the right foot on our new biosphere by ensuring that SpaceX crafts traveling to Mars are stocked only with vegan food and that Mars' colonists commit to enjoying an animal-free diet once they've arrived.

Colonizing Mars can give us the opportunity to learn from our mistakes on one planet and create a just civilization on another. Ensuring that Mars is a vegan planet (rather than importing animal products from Earth or creating factory farms on our new home) would protect animals from the horrors that they endure in the meat, egg, and dairy industries.

Musk seems good humored about the whole idea, which was originally brought up by PETA in August:

The good news for PETA is that Musk can make Mars Vegan with practically 0 effort: Mars has no animals on it. At all. The other bit of good news is that we can finally get rid of all those meddling Vegans here on Earth.

The bad news would be that meat eaters (me included) wouldn't really have as much fun eating on Mars. A space pork chop sounds delicious, but a space tofurkey doesn't really sound as appetizing.

I'd still go to Mars, but I might smuggle a little bit of jerky for the trip.